Monday, 19 November 2007

ITO has been busy for the past 18 months building a high quality on-line model of the UK's transport system, and has been working with data providers and data standards to improve the source data.

We are contracted to provide on-line data quality improvement services to the UK Department for Transport (DfT), every local transport authority in the UK and Traveline. We perform a range of consistency checks on a daily basis, and are currently implementing a whole raft of new tests on the UK's scheduled transport data, including tests on stop naming (there are nearly 400,000 bus stops in the UK and their names should conform to consistent conventions - they don't!), tests that all stops are correctly allocated into a hierarchy of places, and on the transport schedules themselves it highlight potential problems (missing stops, incorrect date ranges, conflicting descriptions and physically impossible timings).

We have worked on a number of key CEN data standards for the exchange of public transport data, including IFOPT (for the exchange of transport interchange data), SIRI (for the exchange of real time scheduled transport data), and we are on a DfT working party to define a data standard for cycling related infrastructure.

If you think that all sounds like hard work, then you would be right, but we now have access to a transport model for the UK with nearly every road and scheduled transport service (bus, rail metro, tram and ferry), and we also have increasing coverage of cycling facilities and have good working relationships with nearly all the UK transport data providers.

We are now in a strong position to provide analysis services to transport authorities and government to guide policy decisions and implementation, and to support effective two-way communication between authorities and the general public on transport matters.